In the moments after finding out that the girl I’d been seeing on-and-off for two years had at one point in her life banged a black dude with a giant cock, I was not, shall we say, “hyped.”

She and I were sprawled out on the bed in my MGM Las Vegas hotel room

It was four in the morning. Memorial Day Weekend. The window providing a twinkling view of the pre-dawn strip. Both of us just in from a night of partying.

And given that this was the first time I’d been alone with her in…20 days? a month?…and given that I'd recently developed Serious Feelings…you could say things were getting feisty here. Fast.

There was, after all, a reason I forfeited the extra $200 for my own room instead of staying with friends. A reason not unrelated to she and I living on opposite ends of California, and all the physical limitations associated with that. She was all mine now, though…in my filthy paws at last…

But then:

“I guess if I had to watch you have sex with another guy,” I was saying during pre-coital chitchat, joking around, “I’d want it to be like porn. Less romantic that way. More funny. You know–blazing lights, fat slob of a director in the room, black dude with a fat cock.”

I reached for my beer on the night stand, thinking: heh.

She sniggered here, held up a single finger. “One black guy. I’ve had sex with one black guy before.”

I froze. “Black guy? Sex?”

“Yeah. While I was in Paris.”

Dread. Dread began spilling into my head like water into a sinking ship. This wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go at all.

“Did he…did he have a…big cock?” I don’t know why I asked this. If I could go back in time, I never would have asked this.

She sniggered again. “God yes. It was so big it like wasn’t even good. It barely fit.”

I glanced downward.

My boner?

Forget about it. As if a pig farmer had walked down there with a shotgun and slaughtered it. Dead limp in ten seconds.

“Well, uh…I guess…I guess that’s a black dude for you. Though I think maybe scientifically it’s been proven that, um, across the board”–I had no idea what the fuck I was saying here; this was total auto pilot–“on average, all races are about the same? ‘Cause there’s–”

“No,” she cut me off, laughing condescendingly, all but patting me on the head. “Sorry, white guys, but I have a lot friends who’ve hooked up with black dudes too. They’ve definitely got you beat.”

I stuttered a few times: nothing.

Then, for reasons I’ve not yet been able to deduce, she went ahead and added: “Yeah, it was weird. He made me dinner, and then afterwards he rounded the table and came at me and we just started fucking.”

There was a good 5 seconds of silence here.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said, rolling off the bed.

In the bathroom, feeling dizzy, I placed a hand against the mirror for support.

Then I passed maybe a full minute looking myself in the eyes, slowly shaking my head.

Fuck.

My gaze eventually wandered down the mirror to my groin region.

Now, I’ve always had a general understanding of where I stood in terms of dick size, if only from gauging reaction to it among the general population.

And make no mistake: my population sample is large. It, my dick, has been presented to a pretty much unknowable number of coeds in shadowy bedrooms. Has been pulled out and waved around drunkenly on countless balconies and residential streets across America.

The verdict?

Bad.

Or, rather, not very good.

Throughout its career, my cock has inspired awe in the hearts and minds of precisely nobody. At best, it’ll pass without comment. At worst, its presentation is met with ridicule. For anyone to start making remarks like “big” and “barely fit,” you’d have to balance a film canister on the tip of this thing, and then secure that film canister using half a roll of duct tape.

Which, all of a sudden, I began to view as very bad news indeed.

Why? Because, still in the bathroom, still staring at my own genitals, a connection was made. A hazy memory from earlier in the night came flashing back into focus:

“Did you know 50-cent is in Vegas right now?” said my kind-of-girlfriend, both of us in some hotel hallway before going out. “That’s, like, all my friends have been talking about.”

“Ah,” said I. “Old 50, huh? Pretty cool, I guess.”

“Yeah. He was at the club I was at last night, and I was super excited.” A pause. “I’d fuck 50-cent.”

Now, granted, in the moment I’d had no problem with this.

Every girl would fuck 50, if shove came to push. He’s famous, he’s rich. The man starred in his own film, for fuck’s sake (Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ 2005; Rotten Tomatoes: 16%). You’d be stupid not to bang him.

But now, still zoning out against the mirror, the grim connection crept up and sunk its fangs: Fucked black dude in Paris…wants to fuck 50-cent pretty bad…is this all about cock size? A big dick obsession?

I glanced down at my dick one more time–again sighing, again thinking: fuck. Then I prodded it with a finger, to see if this sex thing out in the bedroom was still going to happen or what.

It happened, somehow. And actually ended up being quite good (for me, that is: a distinction my mind couldn’t help making).

Only problem was, the whole time, like 25% of my brain functioned as a projection booth, playing out two different scenes on repeat.

The first featured the black guy in Paris as some rapper type. “Shawty, wut you drank’n?”–that was his pick-up line.

It worked. And in the fantasy he swooped my kind-of-girlfriend out the club and back to his pad, where he then proceeded to harpoon her for upwards of two hours on a couch.

In the second fantasy, he was some suave, muscular, well-dressed, gentlemanly black dude. Teaching her French, cooking her a five-star caliber meal, demonstrating an encyclopedic knowledge of French wine and cheese. And then harpooning her for upwards of two hours on a couch.

Anyway. She left the room around 10 am on Sunday morning to catch her flight home. (Wearing my sweatshirt over her dress. She insisted on this, thinking it would dissuade any would-be judgment-passers down in the hotel lobby. A sweatshirt I’ve yet to get back, by the way, and which–let’s face it–is probably going to be taken out back and burned the moment this thing is published.)

She was gone. But me…I still had another 24 hours left to go in Vegas.

24 hours in which I was less a present, enthusiastic, Vegas party animal and more just a hollow human crust drifting through the city.

Like, for example, the pool party at Mandalay Bay.

While most of the time I was technically doing things like dancing and drinking and splashing around with friends, mentally I was far away. Back in the hotel room at the MGM, getting the news. Or in that sinister Parisian apartment that my imagination had built and furnished, watching chest-tightening things take place on the couch.

The sunglasses I had on came in handy.

Twice or thrice, I found myself rooted in place on the pool deck, head cocked toward a large group of African-American males, my gaze fixed immovably at crotch level. Not knowing how I got there, or for how long I’d been standing around staring. Then having to shake out my head, think happy thoughts, resume partying…

But the fear remained: did all these guys have bigger dicks than me? Like, every single one?

Earlier, I dismissed my claim that all races are on the whole roughly equal with regard to penis size as rambling. But I do have some evidence to support this.

A black guy with whom I used to train martial arts, for example, had a legendarily small penis.

Small for any race. Sosmall and so well publicized (a big ladies’ man, he was) that it was more or less the talk of Sacramento from circa 2008 to circa 2009. Virtually any girl you asked in any club could tell you about it, or at least point you to some friend who could. It was such common knowledge at our gym that even like the 12-year-olds in the after-school jiu-jitsu program knew about it. The fucking maintenance guy would talk about it during his lunch break. It might have been the second piece of gym-related information a new person received upon finalizing their membership, right after the schedule.

But it’s true…

Ever since this one afro-penile outlier, the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected from women has, admittedly, been pretty unanimous: black dudes tend to have tremendous slabs of meat dangling between their legs.

And so now, thinking about this, back in Vegas, walking around the pool, I was seized by crippling anxiety when looking at any man whose skin color was darker than, say, a cardboard box. Just terrified. Imagining him with a cock the size of a largemouth bass. Then imagining my kind-of-girlfriend having some sort of extrasensory ability to detect this, and hungrily inviting Bass Dick to go ahead and rip her to shreds on some nearby couch.

The trip, which already had flaming engines, which had already begun its sickening plummet towards earth–it officially became my Worst Vegas Trip Ever just after midnight in XS nightclub. Listen to this shit.

Well, first of all, I’ll say that I was actually having a good time early on. My good buddy Consonant Tift and I had roped in a group of girls (who were on the whole pretty thumbs up) to party with us/make us look cool. Also, we’d kinda docked at this booth occupied by a bunch of dentists or something, and they were reasonably generous with their booze.

I remember at one point swimming through the crowd toward the bathroom, smiling a bit, thinking things may after all at least for tonight be Ok, when the featured D.J., David Guetta (a real European bastard), said something to this effect over the sound system:

“I have very special announcement for you all! I like to welcome somebody to join me on stage…”

Interest piqued, I stopped walking, got up on tip-toe, looked over the crowd, narrowed my eyes.

50 came bounding out–huge fucking grin, throwing up his hands, inducing mass hysteria in the crowd.

I just spun around and left. Walked out of the club solo without saying anything to anybody. Then I went back to the hotel room, where I put on an Elliot Smith record, drank myself sloppy, and anxiously felt up my dick until passing out. The whole time thinking: fuck.

My psychological condition, I confess, failed to improve upon returning home to San Francisco.

And probably the worst part about my first day or two home was this absurd, bad television-style string of coincidences that kept following me around, haunting me. The unannounced guest appearance of Curtis Jackson at XS–fucked up as it was–proved to be just the beginning.

Take for example my first night back.

In bed, teeth brushed, wanting just peace & sleep, I opened my laptop to resume the film I’d been watching before leaving for Vegas: Taxi Driver (1976; Rotten Tomatoes: 98%).

I was still out of my head at this point. Under that kind of what-is-my-life-and-what’s-the-point raincloud that follows you around after any big Bender Weekend. So, you know. I would have been in a delicate state anyway–even without all the black dicks. Even without what was rapidly shaping up to be my own full-blown personal Kock Krisis.

And which scene did I happen to be right smack in the middle of? What was the first thing to come flying out of my laptop and lay a beating on my already crippled psyche in wide-screen, digitally remastered, iTunes-quality HD?

It was the scene where De Niro is driving the vaguely-Jewish guy around to stake out his, the vaguely-Jewish guy’s, wife, while she conducts herself in a most unfaithful fashion with a neighborhood black man.

I groaned, rolled over face down in anguish, thinking: are you fucking kidding me?

Then I thought: the Jewish character's cock deficiency—that's gotta be the root of this affair.

Maybe five minutes elapsed like this before I mustered the energy to roll over again and switch films. I settled on Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002; Rotten Tomatoes: 96%)just because I was reasonably certain there are no black people in there, other than orcs.

Bad insecurity. Paranoia even worse. It got so bad that, the next day, I couldn’t help feeling that San Francisco itself had somehow turned against me, become an agent in this whole affair.

Though the weather had been stellar for months, a fog moved suddenly into the city, creating an atmosphere of menace and general depression.

On my way to work, a gang of boombox-wielding youths followed me onto the subway, flooding the air with rap music as I tried to read peacefully from a book. The text became a blur. The angry voices of huge-cocked black men were all I could focus on.

And upon surfacing in downtown SF: more rap. Blaring from every bus stop and street corner. On my skateboard, I began pushing faster, keeping my eyes up. Not wanting to see who was playing the music, not wanting at all to add their dicks into this whole equation.

But what did this–looking up–get me?

Skyscrapers. Buildings that I’d never given a second glance were now mocking me with their size and general shape.

During my shift that night–a fashionable restaurant downtown being my employer–I was, quite frankly, a mess. Serotonin-depleted. On edge. Serving the rich, white clientele base with all the precision and charm of a concussed chimpanzee. Squandering large blocks of on-the-clock time in the single-occupancy bathroom, self-consciously checking out my dick from all angles in the mirror.

So there’s this homeless man who hangs out around our restaurant. He’s about 70 years old and cane-equipped, and so hunched over that it takes him maybe two hours to traverse your average city block. Skin color: black.

Well, after work, 11:30 pm, while making my way through the by then deserted city streets, this guy materialized in the mouth of an alleyway.

“Ay, man, any change tonight, man?” quoth the black guy.

I shrugged, unzipped the backpack pocket I use for miscellaneous items. It generally contains a loot of a few bucks in coins.

But while grabbing and withdrawing what felt like a Sacagawea gold dollar, two other items tumbled out: a stick of Burt’s Bees lip balm and a Trojan Ultra-Ribbed condom.

Any guesses as to which item–coin, balm, prophylactic–tickled this guy’s fancy?

He descended on the condom like some kind of demonic vulture. It was instantaneous. I’ve walked past the dude daily for almost a year now, and this was hands down the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.

“Ay! Thanks, man! I’m-a be needing this,” he said, and scuttled backwards into the darkness. Leaving me frozen on the spot with my eyes out of focus, the unwanted gold dollar still held out in my hand.

Afterwards, I went home and tried beating off to black porn, thinking it might help me make peace with the whole situation.

No. Not even kind of. It was so untherapeutic it wasn’t even funny.

The first video I clicked was one where this white, upper middle class father figure watched in severe psychic pain as his daughter was violated by a visor-wearing black. Protesting ceaselessly to quote please stop fucking my daughter unquote, while the black dude, of course, refused to comply, just laughed, kept thrusting, and countered with verbal abuse.

Then what did I do?

I spent upwards of 30-minutes desperately scanning Youjizz.com. Looking for a black dude with a cock not smaller than mine, but even just in the same, like, township. One that couldn’t simply entomb my erect penis like one of those multi-layered Russian egg doll things.

No luck. But then it struck me that the few black men who are roaming the earth with regulation sized dicks probably aren’t real eager to hop on camera and flaunt them. It carries with it, I imagine, the same stigma as like an Iroquois Indian that can’t fish. And just as this Indian would’ve probably, I don’t know, faked a sinus infection or knee injury upon learning of a forthcoming expedition involving rivers, a black man of average size, when naked, probably prefers to keep a 50-yard buffer zone between himself and anything that even faintly resembles a camera.

I digress a bit. But still. The last word of that paragraph is important: camera.

See, while foraging for a black penis of normal dimensions on YouJizz, it hit me that it was all in the camera work. The camera was responsible for making all these cocks look so mighty. And thus it followed that, with proper lighting and videography, I could achieve the same effect with my penis.

This led to an interesting few days, to say the least. I won’t go into too much detail here, except to say that there’s now like a gigabyte worth of footage of my erect cock in my iPhone. Minute long clips where I’m just circling around the thing in a totally silent room, with a t-shirt draped over the lamp. Footage that required something like a 20% deletion of my music library in order to capture, and which ended up not making my dick look bigger really at all.

Forced to accept that I stacked up about as well with black dudes as a Golden Retriever would stack up against a great white shark in a sea battle, the next mission was simply to convince myself that my dick fell within the realm of normal. Like, white guy normal. Convince myself I could even satisfy women in skirmishes that were strictly penile/vaginal.

The week that followed has a hazy, dream-like quality to it in my memory, even though I was making a concerted effort to be precise, scientific.

Phase One: Research

–Passing whole nights at my desk in my bedroom: buried in online message boards, chasing academic studies…or, when inspiration failed, simply trolling the mine field that is Google Images. A wet finger held skyward, trying to deduce where I stood in terms of <, =, or > average.

Phase Two: Setting up the Experiment

–Finding myself in line at a CVS pharmacy cradling a fresh bottle of Aveeno, a ruler, and nothing else.

Phase Three: Execution

–Finding myself with a severely bruised pelvic bone after spending 20 minutes jamming that ruler into the base of my cock with all bodily might. Flexing hard. Trying to squeeze every last fucking millimeter into my Official Cock Size Measurement.

Phase Four: Scientifically, Objectively Recording Results

–Measuring for a week straight. Throwing out the low (but not the high) score. Averaging them. Thinking better of it. Keeping just the high score and calling it a day.

But the Kock Krisis, previously only clawed, sprouted wings and fangs and a spiked tail after the Internet delivered this little bit of trivia to my lap: girth is equally, if not more, important than length.

Girth! Thickness! A whole new dimension to contend with!

I wasn’t prepared for this one bit. I felt like a cyclist who’d trained his whole life for the Tour when–nope. French officials have just announced that the thing is now in fact a triathlon. Learn how to run and swim.

What a load of cat shit. And let’s not even talk about my battles with the cursed Girth Test. (The Girth Test: can you fit your erect penis into a toilet paper roll? If no: pass. If yes: fail.) Like I said, I’m not going to talk much about this, except to say that at one point there were about three empty rolls and a quarter mile of unused, ripped up toilet paper in my wastebasket, and that I didn’t get out of bed or turn the lights on afterward for roughly seven hours.

Ok. So if what I’ve written so far is any indicator, things didn’t end up going, um, “swimmingly” with the kind-of-girlfriend in question. Like so many before me, I got jealous/clingy/insecure in the way guys can get jealous/clingy/insecure after receiving a detailed account of a lover’s rendezvous with an ex-lover. Especially when that account is even remotely positive. Double especially when the ex-lover’s dick sounds less like a penis and more like a serpent belonging to the constrictor family.

And make no mistake: this dude’s cock size was, in the end, my sole objection.

It seems like most white guys I talk to have their fingers either secretly or openly crossed that the woman they’re seeing hasn’t slept with a black guy, and that she has zero interest in doing so in the future. In the weeks after the Vegas trip, a little experiment I liked to do was to go up to friends and people in bars and go: “Ok, you either find out your girlfriend has fucked a black dude, or been tag-teamed by two white dudes: which is worse?”

Good ol’ color-blind arithmetic says two simultaneous dicks should never be preferable to one. But most guys, when I presented this scenario, were just totally stumped.

Why? Is it a xenophobia thing? I’m tempted to say there’s some ancient, tribal, Us vs. Them explanation here, but if that’s the case, then how come we feel, like, less than a quarter as threatened/tripped out when we see a hot white girl with an Asian or an Indian or a Mexican dude versus a guy who’s black?

While technically I can only speak for myself, after a long mental sorting out process–during which I often sounded pretty racist, wondered if I was pretty racist–I began more and more to suspect this: black men are threatening to us white guys because we know that women like black men–and black men, as far as we can tell, put us to collective shame on the battlefield of cock.

Which then got me to thinking: how many anti-black racists, if their racism were put through a sieve, would be left afterward clutching just this one insecurity? The fear of a lover or a kind-of-girlfriend getting all but fucked out of her mind and physical existence on some couch by a throbbing, mammoth, black cock?

* * *

A few weeks ago, I managed to lure a Stanford swimmer girl home from my favorite San Francisco bar.

Some time had passed since the lower points of the Krisis here, and while I was nowhere near 100% in terms of Kock Konfidence, I was recovering. Feeling a bit bolder with each passing day.

Anyway. Stanford Girl had just pulled out/begun playing with my appendage, and I, through narrowed eyes, was pointing a finger at her, egging her on with comments such as “Yeah, jerk it, baby,” and “You want that fucking cock inside you?”

She continued fondling me silently for a few moments, contemplating something, before finally looking up and saying: “Yours is so much more…manageable than the other guys I hook up with.”

Dizziness.

A ringing in my ears.

I almost stumbled backwards against my bookshelf. Huge hallucinated cocks belonging to these “other guys” were suddenly floating across my vision. All the patches, all the stitches I’d managed to apply to my ego over the past couple of months–there they went. Ripped up and dangling from just this one sentence.

Granted: Stanford…athlete girl…likely spends a lot of time around…you know. It’s no secret that a decent percentage of the dudes staffing Stanford’s football and basketball squads aren’t exactly pale in the skin department.

But still.

Manageable! So much more!

The weird thing is I’m pretty sure she sincerely meant this as a compliment, but at the same time it was like thanks.

Compliment or no, the whole run-in had me once again pretty fucked up. The week that followed was hellish. The following weekend will likely go down forever as one of the low points in my life.

Yes. A few days slipped by and then there we were again: another San Francisco Saturday night. Another brassy, dim, elbow-to-elbow affair in some bar. One called the Tipsy Pig, if I remember correctly.

What was ol’ Danny boy up to, you ask? Well, tremendously drunk, head once again spinning with questions about my own sexual potency, I was marching up and down the length of the bar with my jeans unbuttoned, thinking: fuck online research. Time to get to the bottom of this thing–for good.

It worked like this: first I’d approach a group of girls and engage them in some standard issue cutesy bar chitchat. Then, if after, say, 15 seconds, I picked up on any non-judgmental vibes–any at all–I’d steer the conversation violently toward the topic of penis size.

Next?

You guessed it. A quick peek in either direction to make sure security didn’t have the drop on me, and then bang: out it came. My dick. Right there in the bar. (I know this probably seems ironic, given the insecurity and the Kock Krisis and all. But exposing myself is a habit about on par with cracking my knuckles at this point in my life: not even conscious most the time, and not going away any time soon.)

The first group of girls scattered instantly, shrieking as they went. The second group was a little more polite about things, but followed roughly the same blueprint (i.e. immediate dispersal).

As I’m sure you can imagine, I took these reactions tremendously personally. They prompted a long, medicinal sit-down on a bar stool that ended up costing me just over $40, and that, afterward, made talking and thinking straight very formidable tasks indeed.

And I think this sit-down can help explain why, when I finally worked up the nerve to approach group #3, there wasn’t even a preface, really. Just a few mumbled words and then all of a sudden I had my pants down, brandishing my cock.

But did these girls flee?

Did they mock me?

Did they throw a drink in my face?

No.

“Oh. Wow. A penis,” said one of them. And then, casually, as if asking what I did for work, she added: “So fill me in–why are you getting naked?”

God bless these women. They were, for the most part, awesome.

I’m saying “women” now instead of “girls,” by the way, because that, I discovered, was exactly what they were. All of them were in their mid-thirties, and all but one were married. They had kids, too, and thus all the easygoingness and tough-to-offend-ness you’d expect from people who have at one point or another had to produce human life from an apricot-sized bodily hole.

Fill me in, she said?

Oh. For around five minutes, I laid it on ‘em. Slurring quite a bit, yes, but still managing to hit all major plot points: Vegas, the black guy, the Krisis, the Girth Test, all the dick footage swimming around in my iPhone, and also the relapse I was now in the midst of thanks to a certain coed from Stanford University. Producing my cock at various times throughout the tale as a visual aid.

Like I said: most of these women were awesome–nodding in the all right places, making sympathetic noises, not even flinching when my dick made its appearances.

The only problem was this one brunette in the group who, about midway through, started rolling her eyes at me. She did it once more as I was wrapping things up, and it was so blatant and borderline hostile this time that I was driven to ask, meekly, “Is there…something wrong?”

She went on. “I mean, check yourself out. You’re going around a bar right now showing your dick to strangers, asking them to tell you it’s Ok. It’s like you’re a little, insecure…high school…girl or something.”

Wide eyed now, beginning to panic, I began glancing around pleadingly at the other women in the circle.

More from the brunette: “Your dick looks normal to me, dude. And even if it wasn’t, here’s a little piece of advice–hopefully you can pass it along to your friends. It’s the clit you guys need to think about. The clit. Start learning about that, maybe, instead of worrying about an inch or two that probably makes–I’m willing to bet–no difference in the first place.”

And it was in the days and weeks after hearing this that I began to consider the faint possibility that maybe I’m a fucking idiot.